Permission to add profile to living relatives
Since my grandmother died 1 year ago, her profile has been merged with most of her descendants and others numbering in at least the dozens due to each of their posterity needing to add them separately in order to connect with deceased ancestors. Also, it was frustrating while she was living that we couldn't collaborate on her profile or contribute or see stories or pictures submitted by others. Essentially, we were only able to see information posted on her by others after she passed away and was unavailable to answer questions to clear up ambiguity or discrepancies between stories and sources.
Both of these problems could be solved if it were possible for people to add living ancestors. To avoid privacy issues, a permission system could be set up similar to requesting permission to view one's relationship to living persons already in familysearch. It would allow someone to search by ID number of the living person (presumably obtained through contacting the person) and request that they be allowed to add their profile, thus reducing duplicates and allowing family members to collaborate on sources, stories, and pictures for persons already alive who can then add their wisdom to the information there before they depart for the other side. It could also significantly reduce the computer memory taken up by many family history oriented youth and adults who each have to add all living ancestors under separate profiles- which must currently number in the millions.
Comments
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I agree completely. The current system guarantees duplicate profiles.
The biggest pain I have in working with Family Search is all the duplicates. It is not unreasonable to guess that close to half of the profiles in Family Search are actually duplicates.
Bill Gee
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FamilySearch has talked about doing this in the past, but legal reasons make this difficult. Every country, state/province and supernational body (e.g. the European Union) has its own laws on privacy. These laws change frequently, particularly in recent years due to increased concerns about privacy. It would be near impossible to design a system that is lawful for all countries.
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I'll agree that the process of recording a recently-deceased relative's death, then doing the merge (or watching out to make sure the next few relatives do it correctly) is a bit awkward, but I'm not sure this suggestion would do much to fix the overall process, and as @A van Helsdingen notes it could easily run afoul of all sorts of laws and regulations, including GDPR and CCPA.
When my paternal grandmother passed away, she had four living children, more than twenty living grandchildren, and a few great-grandchildren old enough to have FamilySearch accounts; and some of our spouses were following her genealogy as well; but so far I only see seven merges into her record. Seven is more than none, but in general the number of "Living" records that will actually converted to "Deceased" by thier owner in the system is some small multiple of the number of active users.
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